The Scar - China Mieville [208]
The beasts summoned by the Armadan cray witches slam their fletches into Crobuzoner ships and tip the crews into the water, to snatch them up with sudden scissoring jaws. But there are too many to control, and they become a danger to their own witch-masters.
In the smog, Armadan shells find Armadan decks, and New Crobuzon javelins and bullets burst through the flesh of their own troops.
At different times, all across the battle, women and men look up and see the sky, the sun, through red clouds, through water, through films of their own and others’ blood. Some lie where they have fallen, dying, knowing that the sun is the last light they will see.
The sun is low. Dusk is perhaps an hour away.
Two of Armada’s great war steamers are destroyed. Another is badly damaged, its rear guns twisted like palsied limbs. Scores of its pirate ships and its smaller fighters are gone.
Of the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts, only the Darioch’s Kiss is ruined. Others are torn, but they are fighting on.
The Crobuzoner fleet is winning. A wedge of their scouts, ironclads, and submersibles have broken through Armadan ranks and are bearing down on the city itself, a few miles beyond. Bellis watches them approach through the huge telescope on the Grand Easterly.
The Grand Easterly is the redoubt, the heart of the city.
“We stand,” Uther Doul is shouting to those around him, to the snipers in the rigging.
No one has suggested anything else. No one has suggested that they goad the avanc and escape.
The Crobuzoner ships endure the barrage from the guns on the Sorghum (and do not return fire, Bellis notices, do not risk damaging the rig itself). They are close enough now that their structures can be seen: their bridges, their turrets and railings and their guns, and the crews who prepare, check weapons, gesticulate, and get into formations. Cordite billows over the deck, and Bellis’ eyes water. The small-arms fire has begun.
This is an organized raid. The invaders do not land ragged across the aft edge of the city: they maintain formation, an arrowhead, and steam directly into the bay of boats around the Sorghum. The Crobuzoners are intently making their way toward the Grand Easterly.
Bellis backs away from the railing. The deck below her raised roof boils with Armadans ready to fight. She realizes that she is trapped on this platform by a flood of armed bodies, that it is too late to run.
Part of her wants to yell in greeting—in desperate welcome—when the Crobuzoners arrive. But she knows that they have no interest in taking her home, that it is irrelevant to them if she lives or dies. She is desperately uncertain, realizing that she does not know which side she wants to win this confrontation.
As she steps back, Bellis feels suddenly as if she has walked into somebody, that she has felt a disturbance in the air, heard someone retreat from her with a quick step. She twists quickly to see, panic punching her, but there is no one. She is alone above the fray.
She looks down into the seething, armed men and women and finds herself staring at Uther Doul. He is perfectly still.
Flintlocks firing, the Crobuzoner navy boards Armada. At the point where the two forces meet, there is the most savage bloodletting. The Armadan cactacae are at the front, and the Crobuzoners are faced by a line of their massive, thorned bodies. The cactacae split men with great strokes from their war cleavers.
But there are cactus-people on the New Crobuzon side, too; and men firing rivebows with weighted, spinning chakris that smash like axe blades into the vegetable-muscles and bones of the cactacae, severing limbs and cutting fibrous skulls; and there are thaumaturges on the invading vessels who link hands and send bolts of darkly glowing unlight into the Armadan mass.
The Crobuzoners